This excerpt is from a YouTube interview (Kevin 'KD' Dorsey hosting) in which a speaker discusses the harms of using extrinsic motivators for sales teams. The speaker argues that extrinsic incentives degrade salespeople's mental health, cause burnout, encourage high-pressure and lazy prospecting, push salespeople into ethically gray behavior (e.g., overstating product capabilities), and lead customers to avoid interacting with salespeople.
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When you use extrinsic motivators, there are consequences for using that. Again, salespeople's mental health tends to degrade. Salespeople tend to burn out. So it's not good for your team. It tends to lead salespeople to act in stereotypical salesy ways where they're focused on high pressure, high volume, lazy prospecting. They're focused on, you know, pushing customers, being pushy, being aggressive. Customers don't like that. This pushes salespeople into moral gray area. The we don't really like to talk about this, but I don't know a salesperson alive who hasn't given an answer to a customer that they wouldn't have given to a family member. Right? Maybe it wasn't a lie, but also it kind of cloaked the truth a little bit. Because again, you're like, dude, I have to make this deal close, so let me just fudge it a little bit on the roadmap. Or let me just overstate what this integration can do just a little bit, right? Just because I know it'll help close the deal. So that's not good for customers to go through that. In fact, it's so bad that we're seeing this, like, move to wherever possible. Customers are finding ways to avoid salespeople, right?
